Barbacco’s wireless wine list

Update: Late word from Barbacco owner Umberto Gibin … The wine-list devices won’t look quite like the models they had previewed for us, so pay no attention to the photos below. Turns out they were offered the opportunity to install the new list on iPads. Those will debut in about a week instead of the little, yellow, different models seen here. Now you’ll be able to order biodynamic Gruner Veltliner while you tinker with the latest from Steve Jobs’ minions. Just don’t spill former on latter.

Moving a wine list from the printed page to the electronic certainly isn’t new — years ago, it was Charlie Palmer’s second-best concept for Aureole after the wine angels — but San Francisco is set to get its own circa-2010 version this week. Barbacco, the open-collared sister to the Financial District’s Perbacco, is unveiling a fleet of yellow handheld touchscreen wine devices to help diners navigate its 105-bottle list. They claim to be the first in the Bay Area, possibly the West Coast, to be using such a system.

Diners will be able to browse through selections on screen, and can store a number of possible choices. Ordering will still take place the old-fashioned way — through a real live human being.

If the last generation of e-lists required manual updates, the new SmartCellar system at Barbacco is run via wi-fi off a central server, which monitors the cellar inventory and in turn is updated by the restaurant’s staff. It was installed by Incentient of Jericho, N.Y., which installed similar systems for SD26 and Essex House in New York.

One big advantage to going digital is that most wine listings come with detailed information, plus a label shot. It’s possible to look up background on the producer, region and grape, and there’s a FAQ-like aspect with regional maps and more info. So parsing the relatively esoteric list, which wine director Mauro Cirilli focused on biodynamic and natural wine producers, can now be done while allowing whoever’s choosing the wine to sound like a know-it-all. That educational aspect was a big selling point.

“I personally fell in love after about five seconds,” said Cirilli, who runs the lists for both Barbacco and Perbacco, who with owner Umberto Gibin decided to install the system. “Sometimes you don’t have time to talk. A paper wine list is limited.”

A quick test drive late last week showed the potential for browsing at length — your dinner companions might or might not love that , depending on their wine-nerd quotient — although a sluggish wireless connection created a long lag between screens. (They insist it’ll be blazing-fast by its debut today or tomorrow.) You can also search by price or type of wine.

Particularly special was a third category beyond red and white — “White?!” — which encompasses the category I’d call “orange.” First, it’s a pleasure that Barbacco carries at least a half-dozen of these, like the 2004 Radikon Jakot. But even before you tap through to the selections, the tablet also explains the complex process of making such wines. If diner education like that will help get more people to try skin-fermented Ribolla Gialla without feeling like a dolt for querying the sommelier, all the better.

Of course Cirilli isn’t ditching his paper lists quite yet, which may be a wise idea. There’s still something quite effective about browsing the old way rather than tapping along; what’s lost in educational virtue is made up in speed. But given the number of iPhones being wielded at any given moment on Barbacco’s floor, it’s safe to say downtown crowds may find the little yellow tablets to be this summer’s must-have table decoration.